College --Undergrad Lower Division

  • May 12, 2009 Teaching and Learning hour-long webinar panel discussion presented by Laura Kubatko, The Ohio State University; Danny Kaplan, Macalester College; and Jeff Knisley, East Tennessee State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. National reports such as Bio2010 have called for drastic improvements in the quantitative education that biology students receive. The three panelists are involved in three differently structured integrative programs aimed to give biology students the statistics that are useful in learning and doing biology. The three programs have some surprising things in common for teaching introductory statistics. All three involve connecting calculus and statistics. All three reach beyond the mathematical topics usually encountered in intro statistics in important ways. All three aim to keep the mathematics and statistics strongly connected to biology. The panelists describe their different approaches to teaching statistics for biology and discuss how and why an integrated approach gives advantages. Important issues are how to tie statistics advantageously with calculus, how to keep "advanced" mathematical and statistical topics accessible to introductory-level biology students, and how to employ computation productively. The discussion contrasts a comprehensive "team" approach (at ETSU) with stand-alone courses (at Macalester and at OSU) and refers to the institutional opportunities and constraints that have shaped the programs at their different institutions.

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  • June 9, 2009 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Dalene Stangl, Duke University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Oho State University. This webinar presents the core materials used at Duke University to teach Bayesian inference in undergraduate service courses geared toward social science, natural science, pre-med, and/or pre-law students. During the semester this material is presented after completing all chapters of the book Statistics by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves. It uses math at the level of basic algebra.
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  • July 14, 2009 Teaching and Learning webinar resented by Margo Vreeburg Izzo, The Ohio State University Nisonger Center, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein University. Teaching a diverse college population is a challenge that most college faculty face each day. Universal Design for Learning is an approach to teaching that takes into consideration different student experiences, different cultures, and other issues such as disability. By examining curriculum and instruction through the context of universal design, you can engage as many students as possible in your college classroom and increase achievement by engaging students through a variety of methods ranging from electronic voting machines during class lectures to podcasts to deliver/reinforce essential course content.
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  • March 24, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Nicholas Horton, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. Students have a hard time making the connection between variance and risk. To convey the connection, Foster and Stine (Being Warren Buffett: A Classroom Simulation of Risk and Wealth when Investing in the Stock Market; The American Statistician, 2006, 60:53-60) developed a classroom simulation. In the simulation, groups of students roll three colored dice that determine the success of three "investments". The simulated investments behave quite differently. The value of one remains almost constant, another drifts slowly upward, and the third climbs to extremes or plummets. As the simulation proceeds, some groups have great success with this last investment--they become the "Warren Buffetts" of the class. For most groups, however, this last investment leads to ruin because of variance in its returns. The marked difference in outcomes shows students how hard it is to separate luck from skill. The simulation also demonstrates how portfolios, weighted combinations of investments, reduce the variance. In the simulation, a mixture of two poor investments is surprisingly good. In this webinar, the activity is demonstrated along with a discussion of goals, context, background materials, class handouts, and references (extra materials available for download free of charge)

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  • April 28, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Herbert Lee, University of California - Santa Cruz, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. Getting and retaining the attention of students in an introductory statistics course can be a challenge, and poor motivation or outright fear of mathematical concepts can hinder learning. By using an example as familiar and comforting as chocolate chip cookies, the instructor can make a variety of statistical concepts come to life for the students, greatly enhancing learning. As illustrated in this webnar, topics from variability and exploratory data analysis to hypothesis testing and Bayesian statistics can be illuminated with cookies.
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  • May 26, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Dennis Pearl, The Ohio State Unversity, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. This webinar describes a computer lab activity using the Flash-based applet at www.causeweb.org/mouse_experiment to teach key principles regarding the value of random assignment. These include: 1) how it helps to eliminate bias when compared with a haphazard assignment process, 2) how it leads to a consistent pattern of results when repeated, and 3) how it makes the question of statistical significance interesting since differences between groups are either from treatment or by the luck of the draw. In this webinar, the activity is demonstrated along with a discussion of goals, context, background materials, class handouts, and assessments.
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  • June 23, 2009 Activity webinar presented and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. This webinar describes an activity that uses the playlist from an iPod music player to teach the concept of random selection, the various sampling techniques, and the use of simulation to estimate probability. The webinar includes a discussion of the background of this activity, the learning goals of the activity, how this activity can be adapted to different levels of technology, suggestions for assessment, and other supplemental reference materials. (handouts and other materials available for free download)
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  • July 28, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Jo Hardin, Pomona College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. Based on an activity by John Spurrier, this webinar uses a baseball example to introduce students to Bayesian estimation. Students use prior information to determine prior distributions which lead to different estimators of the probability of a hit in baseball. The webinar also compares different Bayesian estimators and different frequentist estimators using bias, variability, and mean squared error. The effect that sample size and dispersion of the prior distribution have on the estimator is then illustrated by the activity.
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  • Let me throw a mathematical dilemma at you - there`s 500 left. Well how come the odds of you winning are a million to one? is a quote by British TV personality Simon Cowell (1959 - ). Cowell said this to a contestant on the British TV talent competition "Pop Idol" on October 5, 2001.
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  • Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death. This is a quote from James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. The quote came in a speech delivered in the House of Representatives on December 16, 1867 in which Garfield (then a congressman) was arguing for the value of a broad and scientifically sound census. The quote is found on page 216 of the 1881 book "The Life and Work of James A. Garfield," by John Clark Ridpath.
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